Concentra

Predictive analytics improve circulation management

The Low Down

Industry

Salesforce Products

Region

Capabilities

Introduction

Concentra is an independent multimedia company in Belgium with seven media activity clusters: Newspapers, free press, Industry and services, audio-visual, books and magazines, classifieds and digital media. The company invests continuously in technological progress. In recent years the media market has been evolving substantially, consequently so did Concentra.

The Challenge

Being successful in today’s highly competitive media market, requires media companies to achieve operational excellence. Concentra determined their circulation manually. To address this, they asked 4C to design an analytical model that would predict circulation automatically in 60% of the “point-of-sales x newspaper” combinations, while maintaining predetermined objectives on waste and service level.

The Solutions

Step 1

In a first stage of the Proof Of Concept 4C was asked to assist in improving the service management for the circulation of newspapers to the point-of-sales. 4C provided a forecasting and optimisation model for the circulation on “newspaper x target group” level. However, this level of aggregation proved to be a little too high to result in the pre-determined targets on point of sales level.

Step 2

Hence, in this second stage, 4C did a similar exercise but on point-of-sales level. Additionally 4C developed an optimisation scheme based upon ‘the newsboy problem’ which is a mathematical model used to determine the optimal inventory level. By using the newsboy model it is decided how many copies of the day’s paper need to be kept in stock whilst there is an uncertain demand and knowing that unsold copies will be worthless the next day.